C. Jenkins/Vulture

I am by turns more hopeful about queer representation in hip-hop and less sure I will live
to see a time when the community doesn’t excuse and ignore hateful, homophobic, transphobic rhetoric. Photo: Rich Fury/Getty Images

If you coddle hip-hop’s cisgendered, heteronormative core, you can cook. If you show too much queer attraction and self-expression, people get uncomfortable. The illusion of respect for our differences erodes.

In the week since Lil Nas X released the provocative, pointedly homoerotic “Industry Baby” music video and North Carolina rapper DaBaby regaled a Miami Rolling Loud audience with a vile quip about gay sex and AIDS between songs, conversations about homosexuality and homophobia in hip-hop that have been percolating all year have come to a head. It’s been a painful handful of days, full of terrible conversations, lies, prejudices, and false equivalences. It’s been illuminating watching masks come off and hearing what people think these two stories say about the state of hip-hop. T.I. weighed in on Instagram, complimenting Lil Nas’s courage but also positing the “Industry Baby” video and the Rolling Loud remarks as acceptable opposites, respectable differences of opinion: “If you have a Lil Nas X video, and him living his truth, you gone damn sure have people like DaBaby who are going to speak they truth.”

The message in the many twists this dialogue has taken is that a lot of people who claim credit for being open-minded also maintain that they deserve the right to object to some of the avenues of expression favored by the queer people they purport to have no problem with. It’s acceptance with a caveat: You can be gay, bi, trans, pan, nonbinary, what have you, so long as you don’t make too much noise about it. If you coddle hip-hop’s cisgendered, heteronormative core, you can cook. If you show too much queer attraction and self-expression, people get uncomfortable. The illusion of respect for our differences erodes. Acceptance is conditional upon giving the masses something to relate to. Young M.A is appreciated because straight male hip-hop fans see themselves in her verses about romancing women; there’s enough ambiguity and fluidity in Tyler, the Creator’s music to give a listener plausible deniability about whether the song they’re listening to is about falling in love with a man or not…

– craig jenkins

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